Welcome back! 👋 It's going to be a pivotal year for Alloy, with some truly groundbreaking new experiences and features heading your way very soon! In the meantime, there have been some significant changes in this month's release, along with the usual assortment of fixes and improvements.

The update took place during the evening of the 9th January. For a full list of changes in v2.66, please visit the Alloy Changelog.

New standard paths ➡️ ↘️ ↗️ ⚡

We've introduced the concept of standard paths to the Pathfinder. These are predefined shortcuts to attributes on connected designs or interfaces.

The Pathfinder lets you browse and select the attributes of a design/interface, plus the attributes of any others that are connected to it via a Link attribute. You can follow a Link attribute to visit a child design/interface, or navigate to a parent design/interface that links to the current one. You can repeat this in either direction for any number of "hops", enabling you to select attributes across multiple designs/interfaces where a path exists between them.

A standard path provides a handy shortcut to a connected attribute. Selecting it adds the attribute to your query in one go, saving you the time and effort of navigating to the relevant design/interface (potentially over many hops). Not only does this bring the connected attribute within easy reach, it also surfaces the attribute to users that may be unaware of its availability!

Standard paths can be defined on individual designs or interfaces. Currently, this can only be done via the API using the Design and DesignInterface endpoints (see Swagger or ReDoc).

However, it will soon be possible to define your own standard paths, as part of a whole new way of accessing Alloy! Stay tuned… 😉

Item form Link attribute filtering on Mobile 🛂

Item forms let you customise the visibility and order of attributes when creating/editing items of a particular design.

On a Link attribute control, it's possible to set a query that filters and sorts the linked items stored in the attribute. This provides a way to customise the lookup list shown to users when they select that control on the form.

For example, it can be used to limit the available choices for the Status Link attribute on task items.

This functionality is now available on Alloy Mobile on iOS and will be available on Android next month. When creating/editing an item of a design with an item form, if you select a Link attribute control that has a query set, the contents of the lookup list will now be filtered accordingly on Alloy Mobile.

Please note that item form expressions are not yet available on Alloy Mobile and will go unprocessed if present. Additionally, some of the less common control types don't currently display on Alloy Mobile. To see which are compatible, see Item form controls in Alloy Help.

API authentication 🔑

As previously announced, we can confirm that Alloy's API authentication has now been updated to only accept bearer tokens for enhanced security. Therefore, any tools or implementations that still supply tokens as headers or URL parameters will no longer be able to authenticate. If this causes any problems for you, please reach out to our Support team for assistance.